Streams: Equitable Growth

Should-Read: Kevin Kelly: The Myth of a Superhuman AI: "'I’ve heard that in the future computerized AIs will become so much smarter than us that they will take all our jobs and resources, and humans will go extinct. Is this true?' That’s the most common question I get whenever I give a talk about AI...

...Buried in this scenario of a takeover of superhuman artificial intelligence are five assumptions which, when examined closely, are not based on any evidence. These claims might be true in the future, but there is no evidence to date to support them. The assumptions behind a superhuman intelligence arising soon are:

Artificial intelligence is already getting smarter than us, at an exponential rate.

We’ll make AIs into a general purpose intelligence, like our own.

We can make human intelligence in silicon.

Intelligence can be expanded without limit.

Once we have exploding superintelligence it can solve most of our problems.

In contradistinction to this orthodoxy, I find the following five heresies to have more evidence to support them.

Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.

Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.

Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.

Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.

Intelligences are only one factor in progress.

If the expectation of a superhuman AI takeover is built on five key assumptions that have no basis in evidence, then this idea is more akin to a religious belief—a myth. In the following paragraphs I expand my evidence for each of these five counter-assumptions, and make the case that, indeed, a superhuman AI is a kind of myth....

We run on ecosystems of thinking. We contain multiple species of cognition that do many types of thinking: deduction, induction, symbolic reasoning, emotional intelligence, spacial logic, short-term memory, and long-term memory. The entire nervous system in our gut is also a type of brain with its own mode of cognition. We don’t really think with just our brain; rather, we think with our whole bodies. These suites of cognition vary between individuals and between species. A squirrel can remember the exact location of several thousand acorns for years.... That superpower is bundled with some other modes that are dim compared to ours in order to produce a squirrel mind....

Likewise in AI. Artificial minds already exceed humans in certain dimensions. Your calculator is a genius in math; Google’s memory is already beyond our own in a certain dimension. We are engineering AIs to excel in specific modes. Some of these modes are things we can do, but they can do better, such as probability or math. Others are type of thinking we can’t do at all—memorize every single word on six billion web pages, a feat any search engine can do. In the future, we will invent whole new modes of cognition that don’t exist in us and don’t exist anywhere in biology.... In many cases they will be new, narrow, “small,” specific modes for specific jobs—perhaps a type of reasoning only useful in statistics and probability. In other cases the new mind will be complex types of cognition that we can use to solve problems our intelligence alone cannot.... At the same time we will integrate these various modes of cognition into more complicated, complex societies of mind....

Thinking differently from humans is AI’s chief asset. This is yet another reason why calling it “smarter than humans” is misleading and misguided....

I understand the beautiful attraction of a superhuman AI god. It’s like a new Superman. But like Superman, it is a mythical figure. Somewhere in the universe a Superman might exist, but he is very unlikely. However myths can be useful, and once invented they won’t go away. The idea of a Superman will never die. The idea of a superhuman AI Singularity, now that it has been birthed, will never go away either. But we should recognize that it is a religious idea at this moment and not a scientific one. If we inspect the evidence we have so far about intelligence, artificial and natural, we can only conclude that our speculations about a mythical superhuman AI god are just that: myths....

Yet non-superhuman artificial intelligence is already here, for real.... In the wider sense of... a continuous spectrum of various smartness, intelligences, cognition, reasonings, learning... AI is already pervasive on this planet and will continue to spread, deepen, diversify, and amplify. No invention before will match its power to change our world, and by century’s end AI will touch and remake everything in our lives. Still the myth of a superhuman AI, poised to either gift us super-abundance or smite us into super-slavery (or both), will probably remain alive—a possibility too mythical to dismiss...

Should-Read: Noah Smith: How Universities Make Cities Great: "Abel and Deitz find that university research expenditures have a strong effect on the number of educated people in a region—over four times as strong as the effect of degree production...

Should-Read: This makes no sense at all. There is nothing in the formal or informal record suggesting that any of the potential deciders and influencers inside the Trump Administration support the steel and aluminum tariffs as some kind of Xanatos Gambit to persuade China to adopt intellectual property rules more to the liking of U.S. firms doing business in China. Absolutely nothing: Martin Feldstein: The Real Reason for Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: "The US tariffs will... increase the likelihood that China will accelerate the reduction in subsidized excess capacity...

Should-Read: Hospital services are somewhat misleading, because they buy us a lot more today than they bought us back in the 1990s. College tuition as well: it is a decline in financial aid as a proportion to cost that has driven the cost up so much. College textbooks is a monopoly intellectual property story. It is an extraordinary-shift-in-relative-prices story. But a large part of that story is a political story: Barry Ritholtz: Inflation: Price Changes 1997 to 2017: "It is notable that the two big outliers to the upside are health care (hospital, medical care, prescription drugs) and college (tuition, textbooks, etc.)...

Should-Read: Absolutely brilliant from Henry Farrell. If being muted by Jonathan Chait were to regularly produce such good thought, Chait should mute everybody immediately!: Henry Farrell: We’re all going to need safe spaces: "Speech doesn’t scale, and at a certain point, the scarce resource isn’t speech but attention...

Should-Read: FT: Thoughts for the weekend: "'To wit, Phil Gramm was right: We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.' - 2008 comments from President Trump's new economic advisor [Larry Kudlow]..."

Should-Read: By and large a good statement. However, while free speech extends to statements made with "conscious indifference to their truth content", I do not believe that academic freedom does. Professors who make and reiterate and decide to die on the hill that is statements made with "conscious indifference to their truth content" are violating the norms of academic responsibility as much as those who commit plagiarism or falsify experimental results. I do not believe that the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania should continue to employ Professor Wax: Ted Ruger (Dean): Lawyers, Guns & Money: "Dear members of the Penn Law community...

Should-Read: Iason Gabriel: The case for fairer algorithms: "Software used to make decisions and allocate opportunities has often tended to mirror the biases of its creators, extending discrimination into new domains...

Should-Read: This is not an economist's forecast. This is affinity fraud. Directed against Trump? Against Kudlow's Fox News viewers? Against some group of right-wing investors? In all cases, the hope is that the marks have short memories—or that something else will turn up. Paul Bedard: Larry Kudlow predicts 4%-5% growth, 'investment boom': "Larry Kudlow, picked to be President Trump’s new economic adviser...

I confess that I am a great fan of Applied History. Theoretical arguments and conceptual frameworks are, ultimately, nothing but distilled, crystalized, and chemically cooked history. After all, what else could they possibly be? And it is very important to know whether the distillation, crystallization, and chemical cooking processes that underpin the theory and made the conceptual frameworks were honest ones. And that can be done only by getting good historians into the mix—in a prominent and substantial way.

But if this is what "Applied History" is to be, AY-YI-YI-YI-YI-YI-YI!!!!

Niall Ferguson: Fetch the purple toga: Emperor Trump is here: "Think of Harvey Weinstein, the predator whose behaviour was for years an 'open secret' among precisely the Hollywood types who were so shrill last year in their condemnation of Donald Trump for his boasts about 'grabbing' women by the genitals...

There has long been discussion of whether Larry Kudlow believes what he says. (1) Is he one of the professional Republican commentators like Stephen Moore, James Glassman, and Kevin Hassett who knows that what he says is wrong, but says it because it is just a game—that feeding one's readers and viewers something that is not bullshit is simply not a goal, and telling the truth will serve when it does not conflict with one's goals? Or (2) is he just not aware of the world outside him, in the sense in which people are usually oriented toward reality?

...In Flint, Michigan, the share was 51 percent. That staggering fact frames a new paper by three Harvard economists—Benjamin Austin, Ed Glaeser, and former Treasury secretary/chief Obama economic adviser Larry Summers.... it’s notable that Glaeser and Summers are now embracing an active government role in revitalizing struggling parts of the country, and trying to work through the best way to do it.

While the idea that Youngstown, Ohio, needs more help than San Francisco might seem intuitive to a non-economist, the economic case for policies targeting certain areas, rather than certain kinds of individuals, is somewhat shakier.... Most variation in incomes is within regions, not between them.... Why implement policies to boost specific geographic areas when you could just direct money to poor individuals instead?... Austin, Glaeser, and Summers argue that place-based policies are necessary because different regions respond to various public policies differently.... The authors roughly estimate how responsive workers in different areas are to employment subsidies that boost their wages by estimating how employment changes in different areas as wages rise and fall. Sure enough, they find that West Virginians are more than three times as sensitive to changes in the rewards to work as Wyoming residents are. That is: Employment subsidies targeted at struggling states like West Virginia are likely to be considerably more effective than subsidies to better-off states like Wyoming...

Should-Read: Dani Rodrik: Trump’s Trade Gimmickry: "The imbalances and inequities generated by the global economy cannot be tackled by protecting a few politically well-connected industries, using manifestly ridiculous national security considerations as an excuse...

Larry Kudlow has not been an economist in at least a generation. Rather, he plays an economist on TV. Whatever ability he once had to make or analyze or present coherent and data-based economic arguments is long gone—with a number of his old friends blaming long-term consequences of severe and prolonged drug addiction.

The right way to view this appointment is, I think, as if Donald Trump were to name William Shatner to command the Navy's 7th Fleet.

That said, probably little damage will be done. The major day-to-day job of the NEC Chair is to coordinate the presentation of economic policy options to the President, and to try to keep the agencies and departments on the same page as they implement policy. Kudlow has negative talents in either organizing and presenting alternative points of view or in controlling bureaucracies. Therefore the agencies will each continue marching to its different drummer, and there will be no coherent presentation of policy options to the President. But that will not be new.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (March 4, 1933): I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels...

Should-Read: So is it now time to shift to the prime-age employment rate as our principal thumbnail shorthand gauge for the state of the labor market?: Nick Bunker: Just how tight is the U.S. labor market?: "Spoiler: There’s room for the job market to improve...

Project Syndicate: Trump’s Tax on America: "After a year of serving as a useful idiot for congressional Republicans and their wealthy donors to push through tax cuts and deregulation, US President Donald Trump is now following through on his protectionist promises. Sooner or later, Republicans might realize that inept kleptocracy is not the best form of government after all.

Mitch McConnell, the US Senate’s Republican Majority Leader, recently proclaimed that “2017 was the best year for conservatives in the 30 years that I’ve been here,” not least because President Donald Trump’s administration “has turned out to be … very solid, conservative, right of center, pro-business.” One would undoubtedly hear Republican donors express similar sentiments over their shrimp hors d’oeuvres. After all, the Trump administration has rolled back environmental regulations and cut taxes for the rich. What’s not to like?... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Ask a historian, or a political scientist, or a politician the question, “Who benefited from North American slavery?” and the answer you will probably get is, “The slaveholders, of course. The slaveholders got to work their slaves hard, pay them little, sell what they made for healthy prices, and get rich."

[Harold] Macmillan dubbed Roosevelt ‘The Emperor of the West’, and Churchill ‘The Emperor of the East’. When Eisenhower paid court to Roosevelt, Macmillan said to Bob Murphy, ‘Isn’t he just like a Roman centurion?’ The classical analogy famously went further. To Dick Crossman, Director of Psychological Warfare at AFHQ, he said:

We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans – great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run A.F.H.Q. as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius...

Should-Read: Lots to think about about how statistics and economics should be being taught these days: Drew Conway (2013): The Data Science Venn Diagram: "The primary colors of data: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise...

Should-Read: *Anatole Kaletsky *: The Market Dogs That Didn’t Bark: "The bond market’s complacency about US interest rates and inflation may be surprising... [may] turn out to be an expensive mistake... but it is a fact...

Recent and Worth Highlighting...

About Brad DeLong

The Most-Recent Thirty

We Are with Her!

Looking Forward to Four Years During Which Most if Not All of America's Potential for Human Progress Is Likely to Be Wasted

With each passing day Donald Trump looks more and more like Silvio Berlusconi: bunga-bunga governance, with a number of unlikely and unforeseen disasters and a major drag on the country--except in states where his policies are neutralized.

Nevertheless, remember: WE ARE WITH HER!

Blogging: What to Expect Here

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world—and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." — Brad DeLong

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"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." — Brad DeLong

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